Our 25 Cent Story

I remember my first glimpse of Drouin back in 2010. Actually, it wasn’t Drouin itself (which is barely even a place to begin with), but the river that ran alongside the impossibly bumpy road.

The river was the color of weak chocolate milk. There was no way it could be water, I thought. And yet – children were bathing in it, mothers were washing clothes in it, and pots were being filled to begin the day’s cooking. From this waterway (the Arbonite River, I would later learn), came the deadly cholera epidemic that swept through a country already broken into little pieces by the earthquake earlier that year.

The people of Arbonite Valley–the vast majority of them rice farmers–were afraid to drink from the river, for they knew that sickness could strike them if they did. But yet, what else could they do?

We arrived at our destination–a school set up by Pastor Jean-Alix Paul, our local Haitian leader. The children, shy but happy, stared curiously. They were uniformly dressed in blue, except for a few that were clad in all black. “Those children have lost family to cholera.” Jean-Alix stated, answering the question we didn’t want to ask.

As we toured the school, a commotion came from one of the classrooms. A little girl had fallen from her chair; she had passed out. After waking, and then prompted by gentle inquiries from Jean-Alix, she said that she her family hadn’t any food to give her, and though she had walked to school in the unrelenting Haitian sun, she refused to drink any water. “I didn’t want to die.”

Later, we spoke with Jean-Alix, wondering what it would take–how much it would cost–to feed this little girl. He thought about it briefly and said “twenty-five cents.”

Twenty-five cents.

A figure so small, I’ve often been unwilling to pick it up from the ground, and yet – it is all it takes to provide a meal to a child.

This fall, doing good is as simple as drinking coffee. Our friends at Raleigh Coffee Company will be donating $.25 for every bag of coffee purchased to Help One Now’s work in Drouin, Haiti. The money will be used to provide food for children living in extreme poverty.